


World Burnt To Ashes

by nerddowell



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-16
Updated: 2013-11-16
Packaged: 2018-01-01 19:07:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1047520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerddowell/pseuds/nerddowell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grantaire is basically Haymitch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	World Burnt To Ashes

**Author's Note:**

> [Iona](http://pyladesslightlytipsy.tumblr.com) made me do it.

The arena is a wasteland as he trudges back to the Cornucopia. It lies on a plain, flat and open like the end of the world, ash beneath his feet whiffling into the air in small clouds with each tread. Bodies, some burned by the fire that had razed the grass, littered the ground. The hovercraft would be coming to collect them soon. He was half-tempted to lay among them, to see if he could fool them; but the Gamemakers would know. He could not cheat the Capitol of their sport.

His blue eyes turn to the camera, zoomed in on the dirty, exhausted face beneath the shock of blond hair, matted thickly with blood. His eyes are tired, more than his body, more than his mind; this tiredness goes soul-deep. Grantaire has lived with it for so long, trying to numb it with alcohol, self-medicating in his complete withdrawal from life. Of course, he still makes public appearances, mostly to embarrass primarily the Capitol but always secondarily himself, and the memory of the boy he was when he was chosen at seventeen, with his drunken swagger, his tirades of inebriated gibberish, and the palpable agony in his eyes as another two children - walking corpses, as he prefers to think of them, because if he starts to care, it only hurts the more when he fails them again - are brought up in front of him, hope and desperation in their eyes. The only way to get himself through it is to break that hope in half, and even then, he only hates himself the more for it later.

Gavroche, one of the final five, raises his hand as he reaches the Cornucopia, his skinny legs scrambling to push himself up onto the top of it. He lets out grunts of exertion, tears squeezing out from beneath his lashes, and he collapses backwards just in time to feel the knife, soft and gentle as a whisper, slip between his ribs. He kisses his fingers, blood staining his lips as it bubbles out of his throat with his rattling breathing, and looks right at the cameras as his light is slowly, softly extinguished, a flame burning to embers and then to ash. It comes as the dual-edged sword of a blessing, the end of his pain, and a curse, the beginning of Grantaire's.

 

* * *

 

He never watches the tapes with them, after the Reapings. He has no desire to know any of the children he is going to see meet their inevitably violent, bloody deaths in the arena any better than a face on a screen, a cannon shot in the air. The person at the bottom of the bottle, the boy of sixteen he is both running away from and swimming desperately towards, the boy with the whiskey-scented fire in his blue eyes and the skin like marble, perfect and unblemished, he had known since birth, or even before. At least, that was how it felt. As though half of him had been torn away as he tried to outrun the greedy hovercraft with its Gamemakers waiting to pull Enjolras' body away from him, when it wasn't yet cold and he had not yet said his goodbyes.

They didn't care. They took him anyway.

The girl, Éponine... He remembers nothing of her death. He's told it was the most memorable of that year's games, the way he screamed as he attacked her, she practically defenceless beneath the pure fury of his attack. He remembers only his desperation, as though her death might prevent the boy's, when he could already hear the crepitus of broken bones and the sickening gurgling noises as he tried to suck oxygen into punctured lungs. He died in agony, cradled in Grantaire's arms, hot tears dripping onto his face, cleaning the blood away, until he almost looked perfect again.

 

* * *

 

The tributes of Grantaire's Games were also considered one of the better crops from years past. District 12, himself and Éponine - he finds himself able to speak her name, but not that of the boy she killed - with their angled, waifish looks, the scrawny resilience of the runts of the litter, the last two alive. District 8, the beautiful, almost feminine boy with flowing auburn locks braided with flowers he picked in the arena in, floating through the tournament like a dandelion seed on a breeze and yet somehow always eluding death or capture until he misidentified a tuber and died in a writhing mess of watery vomit and chalky pale skin. District 10, the huge, hulking eighteen-year-old with his rippling muscles and a surprising conscience; vicious in a fight, but a gentle giant who looked after the tiny, frightened twelve-year-old brought with him. Districts 1, 2 and 3, the allies: a clown with cocoa-coloured curls and wicked, dancing brown eyes, always ready for mischief, killed by a nest of tracker-jackers agitated by the Gamemaker's careful intervention; a careful, watchful sandy-blond with a precision that could take the eye out of a bird from twenty feet below, dying of dehydration after drinking poisoned water; and the boy, the marble prince, the beautiful, terrible Antinous wild.

He remembers every one of them, and every one since them, and most before. He remembers so many years of agony, of fear, of the gentle caress of alcohol in his veins, coaxing his heart to lay down its load for another night, to allow him to sob into his pillow a name he never speaks when sober; he fists his hands, the long, ragged nails cutting into his palms, and screams and screams until he can scream no more and his head feels as though it's about to burst with grief.

 

* * *

 

The nights he watches, in a cold sweat, hair sticking to his forehead, an intense sickness in his soul as they cry out, stumble, fall; as blood seeps into the ground, as another cannon fires, the sound of a heart's last beat amplified a thousand times in the ears of the listener. For every cannon, he takes a shot of whisky. For every shot, he says a small prayer, something he was taught as a child - he has never been religious, but District 12 has its traditions, and you may take the boy out of the district, but you may never take the district out of the boy, no matter how long he has lived in the Capitol - and he kisses his fingers, wishing them all a swift and painless journey towards their end. Few get their wishes granted. It does nothing to assuage his helplessness, his abject anger. It twists in his chest, forcing back towards himself, a loathing so deep he cannot even begin to express it swelling; he has failed them again, for another year. As he will always fail them.

He feels, sometimes, that his own death came a long time ago, and that he is simply a ghost, dragging around a body of stone, eroding on the inside. He has not felt truly alive for years; to be alive is to feel pain, and there is so much pain that he does not want to be alive. So he drinks himself to death instead, and hopes that he will be numb enough not to feel the dawn in the morning, to sleep forever.

 

* * *

 

She beat him to death. A branch, snapped from a tree, as thick as his arm, as he raised his hands in goodwill. As the words, I won't hurt you, left his lips, a promise from him, a threat to her. She lashed out, the wood hitting his cheek with a crack like a gun being fired; a gash opened where the smooth skin was split, and he staggered. She hit him again, the back, the ribs, the neck, until the branch broke and so did his body. The blind rage came immediately after, until Grantaire had bloody hands as he grasped the boy's shirt and tried to drag him away.

He found a cave, narrow at the mouth, perfect for hiding. He brought the boy there, barely breathing, hand limp on Grantaire's collar, lips flecked with blood. His head lolled in Grantaire's arms, he felt not the kisses to his cheeks, his eyelids, his forehead, his lips; he died there, broken, the blood washed away by tears and the taste of it still metallic and warm in Grantaire's mouth.

Back then, the Capitol sent down runners to fetch bodies. Grantaire had been so frantic with grief, they said, that he killed two of the men trying to reach the body before they had even set foot in the cave. His knife, deep in one's neck; the other, his head banged against the stone wall until it cracked like an egg. Again, he remembers nothing other than that soul-destroying ache.

 

* * *

 

He faced repercussions for his actions. Almost sentenced to death himself, until he reminded them that he was dead already, and what use would disposing of the mortal encasement of a ghost do as far as punishment was concerned? Living still was more than punishment enough.

 

* * *

 

They had been discovered in the midst of furtive kisses and desperate, shaking hands on each other's faces, knowing that if they lived to be the last, they would die at one another's hand; ready to lay everything down for the one they would call brother, were blood not less than what they had. Grantaire had sobbed against his cheek, words he still sobs to himself at night, when the pillow beside him holds the shape of the boy's head: "I can't," and "Please," and a thousand other promises he never made good on. The boy kissed him again, sweetly, tasting of the berries they had eaten for dinner (which gave them horrible diarrhoea, but thankfully nothing worse), and Grantaire drinks sloe gin on those nights, just for that taste in his mouth. As though the alcohol, the memory, can bring him back to life.

And he stares at the marks scratched into his forearm with a District 1 blade, the initial E, his first and only tattoo; the scar left on his skin by the boy who left a kiss on his heart.

 


End file.
